Vives Keeps Fans on Their Feet

Thousands of fans who nearly filled the Universal Amphitheatre on Saturday for a one-night stand by Carlos Vives had paid good money for their seats--but they barely used them.

From the moment the Colombian singer started his two-hour show, the crowd was on its feet and refused to sit down the entire night.

Actually, Vives’ commanding performance wouldn’t let them. The singer and his superb band, La Provincia, exploded on stage with “La Gota Fria” (The Cold Drop), the 1993 hit that made him an unlikely Latin pop star, a long-haired kid in sandals and blue jeans, playing guitar left-handed and singing coastal folk music known as vallenato.

By his third number Saturday, played from the opening without a break, La Provincia was jamming like a jazz band, joyful and fiery. Vives with his long curls was hopping about as if doing a rain dance. Overhead lights, the show’s only stage effect, flickered in precise time with the high-speed torrent of notes coming from the accordion of Vives veteran Egidio Cuadrado.

The effect, like the music, was dazzling. So why couldn’t Vives generate this kind of excitement a week earlier when he appeared on the third annual Latin Grammy telecast, whose ratings were as lackluster as some of its performances?

For the prime-time show, Vives chose a terrific number, “Carito” from his latest hit album “Dejame Entrar” (Let Me In), which earned him two Latin Grammys. “Carito” is a touching remembrance of his boyhood crush on a tall, blond English teacher from Boston, complete with grammatical mistakes expected of a student more interested in the teacher than her lessons.

It also hits just the right note in capturing that awkward stage between innocence and sexuality. The undisciplined “Carlitos” quietly longs for his gently demanding teacher who instructs him to write “a muy perfecto paragraph.” Even after departing his rural valley and returning home, her spell on the boy remains strong.

That’s the way crushes work--from a distance. But on the Latin Grammy show, the teacher in the salacious skit, played by the raven-haired actress Roselyn Sanchez, cavorts with a grown-up Vives after stripping off her classroom clothing, revealing far too much flesh for the grade-school students skipping around the stage with them.

This must have seemed cheesy, if not scandalous, to the average viewer unaware of the song’s sweet message of tolerance for national and regional differences.

An impassioned Vives closed Saturday’s show with that song, minus the skit, one of seven he performed from the new album. In a typically charming exchange with the audience, Vives revealed the tune about the teacher was inspired by reporters’ frequent questions about his possible plans for an English crossover.

“I speak English worse than Celia Cruz,” he cracked (in Spanish) about the famed salsa singer who also appeared on the Latin Grammy show.

As nationalistic as he is, Vives has an eye for what unites us. Looking down from a plane, he says during the show, New Orleans looks a lot like Barranquilla, the Caribbean coastal town that also has a river, and the spirit of carnival, running through it. The comparison yielded one of many clever lines in “Decimas,” which delights in enumerating unapparent similarities, in things as well as people.

Yet crossover seems out of the question for this artist, whose strength has always rested in an unswerving commitment to his origins. His contribution lies in showing us the uplifting and life-affirming power of his native music in its unadulterated form.

That’s what came across so forcefully Saturday--through his intense prayer for peace and understanding in Papadio, his aching nostalgia for his homeland in “La Tierra del Olvido,” his heartfelt offering to a wounded America in “Santa Elegia.”

And that’s why people couldn’t sit down.